By Jim Hagarty
1986
There aren’t that many things left, nowadays, that haven’t been improved. In fact, that’s the great obsession of our age – to improve everything. We want better bodies, better cars, better food and better TV programs. We’d like better government, better mail service and better information.
So, we get basically what we want and the one thing we can be sure of today is that whatever we buy, from tires to transistor radios, will be out of date some day, more likely sooner than later. Buy a stereo, TV or video cassette recorder and the miracle of modern technology will become practically obsolete in the time it takes to get it from the store to your home. This continuous search for something better is good because it creates a lot of employment.
But better is not always best and some things just can’t be improved on. Like rubber boots, straw hats, rocking chairs, long underwear and corn brooms.
The old bristly yellow and green corn broom has swept up more North American kitchens, cellars, granaries and ice rinks than any other type of cleaning tool including the vacuum cleaner. It has herded millions of nosy cats, dogs and children out of the house and brought down cob webs from the hardest-to-reach places in the parlour. For generations, it has kept the sidewalks in front of city stores clean and in its spare time, been horse, harness and saddle to many a young cowboy and cowgirl who rode out into the yard to shoot up the town.
The corn broom is close to the ideal cleaner. It can be used to sweep up everything from water in a flooded basement to windshield glass at a car-accident scene. Its bristles wear down more or less evenly, giving the broom a long life and as its condition deteriorates, it gets relegated from the house to the grimier jobs outside and in barns and basements.
Adaptations of the old corn broom have been a hit in the world of sports, keeping snow and dirt away from curling rocks as they head for their destination in the circle at the other end of the ice and being the main means of propelling the ball in broomball. And, for kids not able to afford a real goalie stick, the corn broom has turned aside many of Wayne Gretzky’s most blistering shots on both basement and parking lot rinks. Many a close game has been halted at critical moments because Mom needed the goalie stick to clean up the kitchen after supper. (The kind of people who most often use corn brooms, by the way, have “supper” at suppertime, not “dinner.” They eat dinner at dinnertime, not lunch. Lunch is what they eat in the field by their tractors some time about half way between dinner and supper.)
A corn broom can be used effectively to “shoo” little animals and little people in a direction opposite to the one they’re intent on travelling. It can be ridden by witches on their Halloween rounds and when its bristles have all worn down, they can be cut off and the broom can start a whole new life of usefulness as a broom handle.
As far as I know, no saying has ever been coined about the vacuum cleaner but for how many generations have people been using the phrase “a new broom sweeps clean?”
The corn broom, though crude in some respects when compared with the modern synthetic-plastic magnetic broom whose fibres attract dust to them like June bugs to porch lights, has managed to survive our computer age and by virtue of that achievement, deserves respect. And, when you consider you can still buy one of these brooms new for as little as $3, they have to be one of the few real bargains left in this world.
I hope nobody ever improves them.
